A blog about video games and not much else. Updates at intervals of time.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Let’s Play Sphinx #6: The Mummy Formerly Known As Prince

Well it’s been a while, hasn’t it reader(s)? I actually
played this segment back before I even posted the last entry in this series, so
given that historians have yet to uncover intelligible recordings from that era
I think we could all use a refresher on what the heck is happening. Sphinx had
recently discovered from Mojo Monkey Man that via a magical artifact, they can
temporarily revive the dead prince and have him scout out the enemies fortress.
The Man of Monkey Magic then uses his powers to…give sentience to a basket,
because that’s apparently the only way to transport items to and from the dead
prince, via poorly explained teleportation magic. We can now return to our
regularly scheduled Let’s Play that I’m sure my obedient legion of readers has
been positively clamoring for.

So when
we cut to Castle Uruk, we pan over a room with entirely too many skulls.
They’re filling the corners, in small piles, and absolutely crammed in the wall
indentations (so much so it’s almost as if someone just stuck a texture of lots
o skulls on a wall). I know this is a narrative trope, but how the hell would
you get, like, an entire room full of just skulls yet not a proportionate
amount of other body parts, anyway? Was this room the result of a mass genocide
of the floating head people?

The
basket named Bas-ket (yes really) is teleported into the room next to the body
of the prince, now mummified. Even accepting that only this animate bag can
enter the castle via teleportation I’m still not sure how the Magnificent
Monkey Man knew exactly where to send him. It’s established he can’t really see
inside the castle, as we’re getting the prince-mummy to do that for him. At any
rate, Bas-ket uses the artifact to revive the prince and fills him in on the
situation, after which you’re given control of the prince, who henceforth shall
be known as the Mummy.

The
Mummy climbs out of the room via a cage and proceeds to the next room. Here we
have some hanging crates and platforms above that most questionably built of
video game structures, the bottomless pit. How exactly does one get a hole of
infinite depth installed, anyway? Let alone why? We proceed to utilize our mad
platforming skillzorz across the room. The next room has us on a ledge in front
of a giant laser. It is in fact, the same laser that leads up to the top of
Castle Uruk for firing surprisingly survivable blasts at interlopers. After
climbing up some moving ledges to the top of the pit, we’re treated to a brief
scene.

Captain
CNE is ranting at his guards to guard harder, because they need to protect the
jewels they stole in Abydos. Keep in mind we still don’t have an explanation
for why they stole those or need them. After the Captain stomps off and the
scene ends, I sneak past an eye guard into a large, circular open room.
Checking a side room I find a treasure chest, but when I try to open it I
encounter a trap and am electrified. However, a nearby sarcophagus, who
apparently can talk, mentions that it won’t harm me, being dead and all, and
that I should try and use it to my advantage.

It’s a good thing
corpses wrapped in rags hold electricity so well

Here we
reach the main unique mechanic of the Mummy segments of the game. The Mummy,
being already dead, cannot die. This means the various traps that would
normally kill him instead imbue him with effects to solve puzzles. It’s
actually fairly clever and these segments in general are usually fun to play
(although this may make it harder to poke fun at).

There’s
some shallow water in between the side room where I was electrocuted and the
main room, which has a conspicuous orb that looks like it needs power. However,
when I touch the water my electricity goes out, so I have to move some
platforms to jump across before trying again. After jumping across the
aforementioned platforms, I use my electrified state to activate the orb-switch,
which reveals a jewel in the center of the room. As I grab it it’s revealed to
be one of the Abydos jewels, and no I’m not going to forget that we still don’t
have a reason those are here. Suddenly giant steel jaws enclose around me in a
little circle as grabbing the jewel has sprung a trap! I’m then…fired out of a
cannon to a higher door? I have no idea why this is a thing. I understand
trapping thieves, but propelling them via cannon to a door that apparently no
one can access otherwise seems to be an inefficient way of dealing with them,
though I guess the impact might kill them were they not dead like me?

The next room through the
door has a floor that moves in and out of the wall, with a passage below where
I can see a chest. I jump down to grab it but sadly the chest is a fake, and the
walls flatten me. This turns me into Paper Mummy, and my 2 dimensional shape
allows me to slip through some bars to get back to the big room where I
started.

I can’t wait until the
Mummy gets his own RPG spinoff series

I go back through the
moving floor hallway without falling down and move on to the next room. I enter
the room at a second floor and can see some type of container on the opposite
side. The bottom of the room is filled with shallow water at the bottom. I head
down a ladder to find a lightning trap, and when I jump on some platforms above
the shallow water while electrified it causes them to move up and down or to
rotate. Using this and avoiding water, I activate electric switches on alcoves in
both sides of the room, which activates a moving hanging…thingy I can hold to
get across the room. When I open the container I find a Lunar Key inside.

On the way back, I get
flattened on purpose to get into another side room I noticed behind some bars earlier.
There I open my first real treasure chest and get an exit key. When he gets it,
the Mummy holds it up in the air Zelda style, and then makes a goofy thumbs up
and voice mumble. I like the Mummy.

This image sums up why
this is more fun to play yet harder to write about. It’s all puzzles and
goofiness rather than serious stuff that I can poke holes in.

When I
pull a nearby lever to exit the room (since I’m not flat anymore) it also opens
up an altar in the main room. Walking up to it, I can take a Solar Key off of
it. This causes the center of the room (that catapulted me before) to power
down. I think I see where this is going. Predictably, using the Lunar Key on
the altar causes a different path in the center to light up. When I walk to the
center it catapults me to a different door. Now, this makes no practical sense
at all, even slightly (who designed this security system?). On the other hand,
it makes for interesting gameplay.

The next
hallway is cool, because it has more lasers, which is always a plus. Those
lasers are above some moving platforms, which are in turn above a pit. There
are two outer blue lasers that trigger water to come up when touched and a
center one that spews fire if touched. I get myself set on fire but avoid the
water by crouching under the appropriate laser, which lets me burn a gate at
the end of the hall to progress.

The next
room is another big puzzle one. You have to move blocks to make it across
shallow water and hit switches, opening up paths by rotating a central pillar
to reach other switches you can only activate with flames. Once they’re all activated, some well-timed
wall sidling and jumps lead you to the Earth Key. I wonder what we could possibly use that for?

“Uh…we could maybe summon
eagles with it…?”

I head
back to the main room and catapult myself up to a new area using my recently
acquired Earth Key, where I see a locked door behind a fence. I have the exit
key already, but don’t know how to pass the fence, though the game hints that
there’s a switch nearby. After wandering around a bit trying to figure things
out, I check the side room where I was originally electrocuted and see a lever
behind a wood fence. Bingo. I place the Lunar Key back on the altar and go set
myself on fire like any reasonable person would. With the Mummy aflame, I avoid
the various water hazards (apart from screwing up once) and make it back to the
side room. I hide in the sarcophagus to avoid the electric trap, burn the fence
and pull the lever, which makes the iron fence up top go down. Whew.

I yet
again use the Earth Key to catapult myself to the door, which I unlock. There I
find a treasure chest which the Mummy opens to find the Wings of Ibis. As he
makes another goofy pose and jauntily strides away, he suddenly faints and his
unconscious body is teleported back to the room where he started (side note, I
can understand him fainting when he runs out of energy, but how the hell do you
explain him warping back to his cell?). Seems our time with the Mummy is up for
now. This is a shame because I was really enjoying it, yet also good because
Sphinx is easier to make fun of.

The
scene then transitions back to Sphinx in Heliopolis. Bas-ket the basket appears
and coughs up the stolen jewel as well as the Wings of Ibis, which allows us to
double jump. Mega Monkey Man explains that to revive the Prince again we’ll
need to get another Canopic Jar as well as an artifact known as the Book of the
Dead to figure out how to send the basket back there. The first one makes
sense, but the second one is bullshit, pure and simple. How the hell could we
send Bas-ket there the first time but not know how to do it the second!?

My Ancient Mystical Powers
also won’t work unless you pick up
my laundry and some smokes

At any
rate, the Mad Monkey Man tells us that Anubis may know where the Book of the
Dead is. Convenient that Anubis is the cause of the problems here, he knows how
to get the thing we need, and the only
way to reach him is by having a double jump from an artifact thousands of miles
away secured for unkown reasons in an evil castle we just happened to have access to. No wait, not convenient, the other
thing. Lazy.

Next time (which will hopefully be under a millennia this time) we’ll double jump over to Horus and
tell him and his high jump to suck it. Oh and probably deal with Anubis too.